Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

We find the most value in the fact that all the modules within E-Business Suit are fully integrated into one solution. It's one place where the entire company can have access to information and functions. This is the main benefit of the product.

The business has all the process integrated, so if you have it in different places it would be crazy trying to do a consolidation or a financial statement or reporting for the business to have all the activity in there.

Although all the modules are integrated with each other into E-Business Suite, sometimes when you apply one patch for Accounts Receivable, for example, it can damage Accounts Payable. That's why it's important to read the ReadMe that says that touching one module will impact another. But that was highly unexpected for us. We're constantly performing patches, and it's become an area of unreliability for our business. We can't know for certain whether what we're doing with one module won't negatively affect another.

I've been working here for thirteen years and we use all the financials modules, plus Property Manager. The financials modules we use are Procurement, Purchasing, General Ledger, Projects, Fixed Assets, Payables, and Receivables.

The implementation was fine. We would have loved to have something like SAP where you just perform the configuration in one instance and you can just put it back into a new instance so that you don't have to configure it again or use another application for that. But otherwise, E-Business Suite is a good tool.

I refer back to the issues when patching one module will affect another module. It's stable, otherwise.

It's scaled well for our needs.

Oracle will always have little bugs here and there. Fortunately, we have a very strong relationship with them, so whenever we had a service request that wasn't moving, we escalated it quickly. So we're OK in that regard.

I do find that sometimes first-level support doesn't know a lot and they ask the "classic" questions. Starting at level two, though, the support gets much better.

I haven't done a setup in the U.S., but I've done them in three Latin American countries. The business analysts are the implementation team and then we do the setups for the test instances. And then we go to our support team to do the configuration for UATs in Prague.

Sometimes we take advantage of all the things that Oracle gives you to go beyond just the basic stuff. We get a little creative so that there's a little more complexity to the setup in the end.

I worked as a contractor for Oracle for some years, and E-Business Suit is a very good tool. You will not find an ERP that doesn't give you challenges. The very first thing, even EBS or any ERP, is that you need to be clear on your processes and you have to clean them up first. Else, you're just going to put more garbage in the system and the system is so powerful that it's going to spit everywhere. It's the processes plus the data. If you can do data cleaning before or during the implementation, it will give you much more peace later on.

This solution is used for handling a lot of modules and files, e.g. HR and supply chain. These are the main uses of Oracle E-Business Suite in the workforce.

This solution offers customization. We have the ability to change and add our custom solutions and integrate them with the standard ones.

These modules are integrated together. HR files are integrated with the supply chain files, e.g. employees are defined on the HR module. You can use this solution as a buyer or as a supplier, and it has a file server. Transferring files is integrated with HR, and the files would be applied to the employees. It can be used and it can uptake the accounts and copy them to the server, and all of the modules could be integrated together.

The most valuable feature of Oracle E-Business Suite is that it is customizable.

The biggest improvement for Oracle is for them to move to the cloud. With Oracle E-Business Suite, movement to the cloud should be supported. I am still not working on cloud applications, but I will eventually.

I've been implementing this solution for four or five years.

This solution is very stable.

Scalability is not related to our Oracle plan. We are not allowed to expand. We're only allowed to apply our custom solution. If we want to add a page or add a screen, we are allowed to do that within limits. We are not allowed to change the Oracle product itself. We can add something, but without touching any object that Oracle implements.

Sometimes, Oracle's support is very good and they give fast replies to all cases, but not all replies contain the solution. Sometimes they provide accurate solutions and effective solutions. Other times, they don't. Support could be improved.

The initial setup and deployment were done by another team in our company. We call them the DBA team (Database Administrators).

I am not working with Oracle Business Intelligence (BI). I am working as an Oracle developer, but not with Oracle development tools. I am working with tools such as Oracle Reports and Oracle Workflow Builder, but not with business intelligence tools.

I don't work for an Oracle Vendor, but I implement some products, e.g. the Oracle E-Business Suite.

We are developers and we aren't authorized to set up. For setup, there are other people concerned with setup, such as the administrators. There are three main jobs in this field. Administrators are responsible for setup, security, and configuration. Consultants are the ones who know the business, business rules, and verification among application screens or pages. Developers receive the instructions from the consultants and apply these solutions technically, and also add and make changes.

I am working as a freelancer, so I don't know all the sites the company implements this solution in, but it depends on the customization needed in each site. Some sites don't have a lot of requirements, e.g. they use the standard form of the application, meaning they don't need a lot of customization. There are sites or huge companies that have a lot of different business cases so they would need a lot of customization. It could take more than one year or two years to complete.

We are from Egypt and we fall under the Gulf area market. Most clients are from the Gulf area, but I don't know exactly how many clients. The main competition is between SAP and Oracle, but in the Gulf area, Oracle E-Business Suite is used more than SAP.

I don't know exactly how much this solution costs, but it will depend on the number of users.

My advice to people who want to implement Oracle E-Business Suite is to first be clear about the customizations they need. This is important. They should be clear and know what exactly they need to implement, and they should also know accurately the changes they want to implement for their business.

I am not able to give a rating because Oracle E-Business Suite is the first app on the market. Every application has disadvantages or points of weakness, but Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft Dynamics are three of the most accurate. They are the three best products in the world, but for this solution, I'm giving a seven out of ten.

I'm working with a vendor to implement Oracle EDS for my customers.

I like Oracle ERP for streamlining the entire process from PRTL and invoice payments. It also has the decision and internet sale order, and my customers can correct the internet decision. It automatically converts to the internet order, and they don't need to create the entry object. They don't need to make a secondary ledger in the parent company and subsidiary. That's very helpful for internet decisions. If they get an order at the parent company, it automatically creates the sales system in the subsidiary.

The user interface could be better. It's not good because they made their interface all in one, and my customers don't want to use it. I have to customize the interface and personalize it to hide some fields on the screen. It has lots of information on the screen, and the user can't easily navigate it. It's very difficult to use. 

I think that Oracle should have something like best practices. They need to provide some patches to simplify the interface based on the industry niche. Because now we see everything on the same screen, but the users don't need all that information. It's complicated to use for end-users, and we have to spend more time training them.

In the next release, I think they should implement most of the features in the mobile app. It should be better. Oracle didn't update their mobile application for a very long time. Connecting the mobile application is complicated.

I have been working with Oracle E-Business Suite for 19 years.

Oracle support is good.

The initial setup is complicated. For the end-user, it'll take about two or three weeks to use one of the modules.

Oracle prices are better in Vietnam and more flexible. If we need to customize something in Oracle, it's very flexible and easy to customize.

I would tell potential users that they need to understand the requirements and the time required to implement them. They can implement it separately in phases. Phase one is very simple. It's simple for finance, procurement, and inventory. After that, we can extend it step by step. They shouldn't implement several models at once as it's complicated.

Oracle consultants should take more time to learn the product, and they have to understand the Vietnamese. They also take time to learn the product becasue it's very complicated.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle E-Business Suite a seven.

The solution is primarily used in our financial department. It makes financial operations easier to perform.

This is a stable product that performs well in our financial department.

It requires training before you can easily use this product, so it should be easier to use. It is of moderate difficulty; not very easy and not too hard, but training is needed.

The installation could be simplified.

We have been using Oracle E-Business Suite for ten years.

This solution is stable and we plan to continue using it.

This is a scalable product and we have approximately 100 users.

We have been in contact with Oracle support and have opened tickets with them. We are satisfied with the service.

The initial setup is complex.

We outsourced for the implementation.

The maintenance is being done by our in-house group of four people.

The license is very expensive and I think that it needs to be cheaper to get a wider range of users or customers. We pay for licensing on a yearly basis.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it for large businesses.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Oracle E-Business Suite is a corporate business product. It has financial, logistics, HR modules, et cetera. It contains lots of modules. Thanks to this, our clients can track all of their business needs with one platform. They can also design their own business needs using this product.

Within our organization, we also use Oracle E-Business Suite. However, we are only using a small part of it, mainly for financial purposes. We don't have any logistics issues. We are consultants: we don't buy and sell products, we don't have a warehouse, et cetera. Actually, all our call centers are onsite. From a company perspective, we have only five or six users, E-Business users. It's hard to give an exact number of how many clients of ours are using this solution, but if I had to estimate, I'd say roughly 10,000 users.

It's an all-in-one solution for corporate companies. There are lots of companies already using Oracle E-Business Suite as it can cover a wide variety of use cases. It's highly customizable. It's available as open-source. As it's open code, you can see what it's doing which makes it easier to customize things. These are the advantages of Oracle E-Business Suite compared to competitive products.

Some of my clients report that the overall ease of use could be simplified. The product still uses some old technology. Some of the modules have moved to new technologies like HTML, et cetera, but there are still old components and old sequence usages which bother my customers because they are not fancy and up-to-date. They're heavy-duty machines — they're not posh. They perform heavy-duty jobs. So users entering operational data, transactional data heavily, they love it; however, management-level doesn't like the screens because they don't look fancy.

I have been using this solution for roughly 18 years.

As it's a heavy machine, it's a very stable product.

Yes, it's scalable. You can technically increase its performance by adding servers, et cetera. So it's highly scalable. I have lots of customers — both big and small companies. Some of them have only two gigabytes of data and others have 32 terabytes. It works well for both types of clients because it can easily be scaled.

Support is a never-ending process because every day, our customers need to change things around. As such, customer support is never-ending. They ask for reports, or they need a new sequence, etc. So it's just a never-ending process.

We have an operational team for technical support. They don't work onsite, unlike the consultants. They are a team of six or seven people. They typically work in an office, but due to the pandemic, they work at home. 

Oracle Analytics is totally different from Oracle E-Business Suite because one of them is a reporting tool and the other one is just a generation tool. One of them has a sequence where you enter operational and transactional data using a sequence or integrations, et cetera. You collect data with Oracle E-Business Suite. And you use Oracle Analytics to repost them. So they are two different products.

Oracle Cloud is nice. With on-premise products, people usually emphasize the setup time. The main difference between cloud and on-premise products is you don't have to provide service and you don't have to scale your service according to your needs. When it's on the cloud, it's easy to scale.

Also, the cloud version of Oracle has new functionalities available. Oracle made an investment with the cloud version and they implemented customer needs and customer requests surrounding features that would benefit them — on the cloud, not on-premise.

So the cloud product is highly functional compared to the on-premise version. That's the main difference between the cloud and the on-premise solution.

Yeah, the initial setup is highly straightforward. It takes four or five days to install. Once we installed it, we made a copy and started using it. The first installation takes time — four or five days. Then, using the same installation, with cloning, it takes only one or two days, maximum. So it's easy to install.

Regarding a deployment team. It depends on the project. For instance, for a big-sized financial company, I need two or three financial consultants. If it's for a logistics company, I need, again, two or three logistic consultants. If it's for a small or mid-sized company, one consultant is enough to implement the project. However, these functional consultants, because they set up the system according to business needs, they need technical support. So we have a technical support team for customization, et cetera. Five or six technical consultants is good enough, usually. If there are lots of integrations, et cetera, I need a technical team of 10 people team.

Currently, we have three projects going on now. Two of them are upgrade projects and we have five consultants involved in each project. One of them is a scratch project, an implementation project. We have 15, 16, 17 people working on that project.

Licensing is on a yearly basis. There is an initial cost, and the standard fee is 22% per year. 

I would recommend Oracle E-Business Suite to other potential users. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

We expect some additional features, of course. We are located in Turkey and there are many tax legislation rules, et cetera. There are so many binding processes that make customizing this product for Turkish districts complicated. For instance, it's easy to customize products for Japan, Kuwait, and Germany because their tax rules are not very complex. But in Turkey, tax rules are really complex and change every month. The government changes everything all the time. Adapting the product to these changes is not easy.

We use the solution in a variety of ways via modules. There are parts for employees and other areas for services. On top of that, we have modules for supply chains. We have modules for human resource management, and financial as well as for retail and inventory.

The solution has helped the organization in a multitude of ways. For example, it has really helped with the way we manage retail orders. The automation of retail and dealer order management has helped us a lot. It is one big use case that's a good example of the transformation that's possible with this product. Previously, the order management was manual. Currently, it has been automated to such a degree that a dealer can simply go to a portal, and actually make a payment. The payment reflects right in the system. After making the payment in the system, the dealer is able to make an order. Within a matter of 10 to 20 minutes, he has his stock. There's an integration between the dealer self-service system to the ERP to inventory and even to the warehouse. Everything surrounding that is fully automated, thanks to Oracle Release 12.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the employee self-service.

The order management is excellent.

I would say the integration needs improvement. Oracle needs to work on the integration layer to make the solution much more robust and modern.

The solution needs full cloud netting.

I've been using the solution since I joined the company. It's been about seven or so years now.

The solution is stable. So far we've not had a priority one or priority two incidence from Oracle E-Business. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. So far so good. I'd describe it as reliable at this point.

The scalability of the solution is good. If a company needs to expand the solution, they should be able to do so.

Our company has between 5,000 to 10,000 users if you factor in the dealers and the employees together. Our average employee count is 6,000. That's employees alone. On top of that, we have dealers who are around 3,000. Adding both groups together, you are looking at somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 users.

The solution technically is supported well both from Oracle, who is the owner of the solution, and IBM, who is the integrator. I cannot complain. So far, we're quite satisfied with the technical support offered by both companies.

When I joined, the company was on a previous version of Oracle. One of the first tasks I handled when I joined I was to head up the upgrade project. It's a solution that's been used from the beginning, or, at least that's my understanding.

I wouldn't describe the initial setup as straightforward. It's very complex. Even Oracle themselves would say that this solution has the most complex implementation of their products. It might even be one of the most complex in the world.

Deployment took almost one year. This was due to the fact that the analysis design alone took almost six to seven months. Implementation and testing alone took another five or so months. 

We used an integrator and a consultant to assist us in the implementation. The consultants were from Oracle and the integrator was IBM. We needed them both due to the complex nature of the setup.

Our relationship with Oracle is simplly one of supplier-customer relations.

This solution is deployed in our organization on credit in two sides active-active.

What I would tell other companies considering the solution is this: first, they need to know that it is an expensive solution. It's very expensive and therefore could only be affordable for companies that have a given level of revenue. 

Beyond that, I would say Oracle needs to be a fit for future use in terms of being cloud-native. Organizations should ensure their solution can run on other public cloud providers other than Oracle themselves. They need to have their permission that it can be deployed in AWS or Azure or Google. Right now, the cloud version that they have most likely locks to Oracle cloud itself and they just need to be aware they need the option and flexibility.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

The most valuable features are straight-through processing because we need to make sure that we have a good end-to-end process. The biggest thing that we also look for is the ability to easily research invoices, where you can attach to the specific invoice line item the detailed payments, etc. We look at it as our biggest factor.

It's important that we can constantly be able to monitor what we've spent relative to the government's money. We always make sure that we have everything in proper order since it is not our physical money. It is somebody else's.

We are an integrated contractor, which basically means that we are contracted by the United States government to operate a program specific to their needs, and to ensure that the program is spending their money correctly, and to make sure that we come in on-budget or even under-budget for the government. We would definitely need to ensure that whatever we do is very much in line with all of the government polices and regulations. We need to ensure that a software that we utilize adheres to that.

The biggest thing that we utilize EBS for is mainly Finance and HRMS. Those are our two biggest modules that we utilize within EBS. So we want to make sure that whatever we are utilizing it for will be easy for the employee to gain access to say, their HR data, or for our acquisition management department to be able to see where the invoice stands in the process of being paid. Those are just a couple of examples.

It is still a little outdated as far as what we consider a twenty-first century software. You're still using Oracle forms, that sort of thing. Payables is a prime example: there's the web interface and then the forms interface and we hate having to switch between the two areas. To create a simple report, at least in my opinion, sometimes requires a developer versus just me, as the user, going in and doing what I need to do. It's extremely difficult to do some data mining on a whim. If there's something repetitive in nature, then we can set it up with a developer, it works, but in our opinion we know that things could work better than the way they are currently.

We've really had no issues with deployment.

The current version that we're on, which is 12.2.4, is decently stable. However, the problem is that the system doesn't allow for us to have a lot of users on it. The hardware that we have is able to run beautifully when there's not a lot of people on. I equate it to, 'The machine's a Ferrari, you can't tow a boat with a Ferrari.' Essentially, the system will go fast when it's allowed to go fast, without the bogging down of users, but that's one of our problems right now. It seems to be that multiple users on the system have caused a lot of back-log.

So far, it seems like we can do a lot of things with EBS relative to customizations. We don't seem to have any real restriction in that area. But some things like, me as the cash manager, setting up banks tends to be a lot more cumbersome than it should be. There seems to be a lot more involvement with doing those types of basic things than they should be in the real-world sense. It seems to be a little bit more like it was geared towards a developer to set up the bank rather than a professional.

Since I'm not the support side of things in the organization, I don't directly deal with technical support, but there are people, such as DBAs and developers, who have been in talks with Oracle about some of the issues. They didn't seem like they had any real problems other than some of the solutions are a little slow to come about. It could be because our organization is very unique, some of the solutions that might need to happen could be a little bit more involved with trying to develop a solution that we need. I don't think we've had a situation, however, where we weren't able to get the needed support.

I wasn't actually at the company at the time, but for upgrades for which I've been apart, they did seem to be a little bit more difficult. A lot of it could be on our end, mainly because of how we do a lot of customizations. We had to do these customizations, unfortunately, because E-Business Suite didn't allow for a specific industry like ours to have more to an 'out-of-the-box'-type of developed software. There was a lot of customization. Now, they have improved from version to version, but for our business, we're still very much away from being cloud-based. Our software sits on a non-internet network. It really is hard for us as an organization to sometimes do business in the environment of, 'Everyone wants to move to an internet system', i.e. the cloud. There are organizations such as ours that have trouble at this point being on an internet-based system.

With our customizations, it stopped a lot of the upgrade that we just had last year. When we did the upgrade, a lot of these customizations were a constant battle where one would not work, another would work, and then when you'd fix one, something else would happen. There were a lot of issues, which we are, as an organization, trying to pull away from customizations. Oracle has not really been geared a lot towards what our line of business was. We have to do a lot of customizations in order to allow for that software to work as we need.

Minimize your customizations if you can. If not, get a lot of training because a lot of the screens are not as intuitive. I'm kind of a rare breed, I guess, as I do have some 'IT sense', so I can maneuver through screens, but when it comes to other people in my group who are really not 'IT minded' at all, they're usually asking me for help when there are some set-ups in their own modules. Setting up is the biggest key, and if you mess that up it's going to propagate the rest of your EBS experience, so you need to have a proper set-up.

It's integrated. For any ERP solution, that’s really where the value comes in; just one solution to cover a whole bunch of areas and having the integration.

I have been using it probably 20 - 25 years.

It is very stable. From an internal standpoint, nothing is going to drag it down.

We did recently have an issue with the supplier network, Oracle Supplier Network, where some certificates were changed that caused a brief outage for us. But that's the exception, not the rule.

It is scalable. We're not a huge company but we haven’t had any issues with that. I have run it at much larger organizations with no issues there.

Technical support is mediocre. It used to be a lot better. The last 10 years or so, it's degraded, where it's hard to get an expert that can really help. It seems to be, a lot of times, their preference is just to get it back in your court and not necessarily help but put the onus on you and hope that you take a few days to respond and then it'll auto-close.

Initial setup is complex. I think any ERP is going to be a complex setup. That's just the nature of the beast.

Usually you'd have a partner that can add the bandwidth. I know we did an upgrade about three years ago. We had a partner come in and help us with that. It's a probably nine-month project, end to end, to do a major upgrade from 11 to 12.

When I start working with a vendor such as Oracle, expertise is a requirement that I look for. Ultimately, it comes down to the team that you're getting from that partner. I always say the best partner in the world still has a B team, and the worst partner in the world still has an A team. Your job is to find that A team in whatever partner you choose.